What's the general consensus of the mileage redemption ability this year?

I've had what I think is good success, even though I redeemed mileage for three tickets. I'll admit, I had to be creative, and patient, but my success stories are as follows:

1. Earlier in March, during the "oops" MLT West Coast - HNL hoopala, I managed to snag my parents two tickets in economy at the 35k rate. I got one leg "on sale" right away, and after checking back, managed to snag the return at the discounted rate. God bless the "no fee for Plat award ticket changes." My parents fly from MKE.

2. I have to go to FRA next month. I got my dad to go with me, and offered to take care of the ticket in exchange for some cash (er, he gets to pay for the hotel.)

I got him the cheap seats on the outbound flight (had to rebook once to get a better date when it opened up) and had a heck of a time finding return seats at the cheap rate for ANY date. And then bam. A couple of weeks ago, the whole month of October opened up for cheap seats.

So, after some looking, I've been able to redeem three tickets at the discounted rate, on the dates that I wanted. Am I extremely lucky, or is that par for the course?

Availability doesn't seem to be the issue... availability when you want availability, and direct connections, and time of day, appear to be the issues. As in another thread, my issue was all returns on a west-cost at PerkSaver were red-eyes, and finding a direct flight on PerkSaver was an issue. I finally gave up, and was finally able to find good flight times, direct, for 37,500 miles.

Right now, the ability of Plats to change awards tickets for no fee is about the number one reason I'd work for Plat. If I can get unpreferred flights now, and change them at my convienence later for preferred flights... that's a benefit worth having.

Steve B.

My frustration with booking(via NWA.com) came when I was trying to book MEM-HNL or MEM-OGG. It showed availability using NW outbound with a return on Delta(perksaver- 35,000 miles). I could never make it work via website.(although showing availibility). I ended up booking my family(4 tixs) only after calling service center.I did get 4 perksaver, but had to pay booking fees for each ticket. Frustrated, but also felt lucky to snag tickets at 35,000 each. Now, waiting for fare sale for MEM-HNL or OGG, so I can get my miles toward lowly silver for 2007-8. I booked these tickets in July for travel in the first week of June.

I've had no problems with availability. None. But I know going into an award booking that I need to be flexible, both with my travel dates, my preferred airlines, and perhaps even my preferred airports. But I haven't had to sacrifice much, maybe +/- 1 day here and there, but that's about it. But I always, always book via the elite line unless it's a simple MSP-XXX roundtrip that is really easy to get on nwa.com.

That's the primary benefit of being Platinum, I guess. There might be better award inventory and the cost to do it all over the phone (or in-person at MSP) is exactly the same as at nwa.com, so I get to ask them to check the exact details I'm interested in.

Nwa.com won't give you a lot of the choices, too. I noticed that you're also a West Coaster, and for us West Coasters, arguably some of the most convenient routes to Europe won't show up at nwa.com (e.g., in your case LAX-CDG-FRA, LAX-IAH-FRA). The website is pretty good at showing NW stuff, KL stuff, and some DL stuff (sorta). It really doesn't like to show CO without some prodding, and AF, you really gotta force it.

The sad thing is nwa.com is one of the better airline sites out there in terms of reward redemption. UA, for example, can't handle a single partner; CO can handle some, but not a multi-city/open jaw.

I've never put any real effort into booking tickets for myself. I'm always borderline for elite status, and as long as I'm an active elite (especially Plat), I've got more to lose by using miles for my own ticket than I have to gain. I paid $850 for this ticket, which wasn't too bad. If I had to pay over $1k, I would have probably burnt the miles ESPECIALLY if I could have gotten the 50k ticket. Personally, I'd rather dish them off to my parents for either cash or hotel costs.

I'm booked LAX-DTW-FRA, which doesn't seem to terrible. I tried looking into the KL LAX-AMS-FRA, but I was advised the 333 is a good product.

ho do you find out when dates "open up"? i am not platinum or anything. i would really like to book a ticket to india for 60,000 miles as advertised - i don't care when i go - it would be treat to make a quick 2 week trip for free! so far whenever i have checked for any date on the website it comes up as requiring some obscene amount of miles (180K)....is it really hard to find these? is there an efficient way to find them without searching through each date on the website?

First of all, the cheapest WorldPerks award ticket from the U.S. to India is 90,000 miles, not 60,000 miles. (http://www.nwa.com/worldperks/direct/charts/us49.html)

Now, how do people find out when dates open up? Persistence, usually. Checking nwa.com daily (or sometimes more often) is simple and quick to do, and if something opens up you can snag it. Also, you can call NWA Reservations and have them check for you. They usually can do it faster and can check the partner airlines, alternative routings, and differing dates. It's worth the small administrative fee if you really want the PerkSaver award at 90,000 miles.

And finally, Welcome to FlyerTalk.

Thanks. India is Southern Asia = 60K Miles?
Where do you check on NWA.com? Do you use the Award Travel Flight Search tool and check all possible dates? That would be really hard - because you can only check 6 days with the flexible date option?

You could try to convince a WorldPerks agent of this, but I think you'd fail. Geographically, you might be right, but NWA has a region called "Indian Subcontinent" that is priced differently. And I agree with that. It shouldn't cost the same miles to go to Beijing (techinally Southern Asia per WorldPerks redemption rules) as it does to go to Delhi.

That would be one option, although it's really not that hard to do a few mouse clicks to change dates around. If you search by standard (PerkPass) levels, nwa.com should show you a monthly calendar with dates that are available. I'm not sure exactly of the process to get the calendar to show up, but I think you have to search by PerkPass and be logged into the Award Travel search engine with your WorldPerks account.

The other option is to call the agent. They can probably give you a decent estimate on how things are looking over a certain date range (a few weeks?) and may be able to find things for you that nwa.com cannot.

Good luck.

What is everyone's success rate in terms of getting better awards by calling an agent vs online - particularly for this year?

4/5 times I can get the awards I want just by calling. Then again, I'm usually looking for awards that simply can't be issued by nwa.com.

As in partner and weird routing awards for overseas? Maybe I should be more specific here - what is the success rate for calling for domestic rewards?